I've done a little bit of animation in the past in Flash and AS Debut but am new to AS 9.5.

I've followed the help guides and several tutorials on smart bones but am getting strange behaviour.

I edit a smart bone movement (or two) but when I go back to the mainline and try to manipulate the limb for animation it's like it won't work smoothly any more.
It hardly responds to the manipulate bone tool and then will suddenly jerk into a new wierd position.

I can only animate the limb to do exactly the same movement as I edited in the smart bone set up and then by only moving the bone I edited as a smart bone. Moving anything else sends it crazy.

Am I missing something? Is this meant to behave like this, i.e. You edit a new smart bone for each different action?

It is hard to know for sure from your description, but it sounds like possibly you are trying to animate layers that aren't children of the bone layer that the smart bone is in. Smart bones can only affect their descendant layers (or bones within the same bone layer) and when you try to affect other layers strange things happen.

I think I'm having the same problem (I think!). I have just started playing about with smart bones and it's working pretty well for the motion the smart bone is created for. However, the other bones don't move with the action. To give you an example of this, I have a smart bone to turn the body to the left. The body turns great, however the bones for the arms stay where they were. Therefore if I try to move the arms, it all goes a bit wrong. Is this "point binding" the solution to have the bones follow the action so they stay in the correct place at all times?

I'm still new to manual point binding so a more experienced member of the forum could help you but it sounds like the arm bones have been un-parented.
Have you checked the parent/link structure for all your bones?

Ah, no, it was something much more fundamental...my complete ignorance of how to use the software properly haha! I created a good(ish) body turn but when moving the arms to follow the body, I did this by moving the arm layer position which left the arm bones behind. I have now figured out it's a million times easier to just move the bones (which are bound to the arm layers) and everything now works fine! Yes, that is how much of a newbie I am